Space is hard, as the decades-old adage goes. For much of the industry’s history, “rocket science” was as much a barrier to entry as a byword for difficulty.
But now a growing swell of young ventures is attracting millions of dollars to pioneer some of the most ambitious space markets — some with little or even no prior space experience.
Take Orbital, a Los Angeles-based startup founded by electric scooter entrepreneur Euwyn Poon earlier this year. The company recently raised $5 million for plans to deploy more than 100,000 orbital data centers.
Poon has no space experience, though he plans to assemble a team of experts from SpaceX and others who have built and flown spacecraft at scale.
Investors have also been making sizable bets on ventures well before they have deployed significant hardware in orbit. Two of the four private satellite operator ventures that achieved valuations of $1 billion or more so far this year have done so without deploying a single commercial satellite, according to the SpaceNews Unicorn Tracker.
